Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
Directed by Justine Triet
Written by Justine Triet, Arthur Harari
Starring Sandra Huller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
Release Date August 23rd, 2023
Published December 11th, 2023
A man is found dead in a pool of his own blood lying outside of his home. Tragically, the first person to find his body is his young son, a boy who was partially blinded in an accident several years earlier. He can see up close and it's not until he's up close to the body of his late father that the gravity of what he can see really hits him. Boy screams for his mother who comes running. The police are called and a grueling investigation is set to occur to determine how the man got from the attic of the home where he was installing insulation to being dead on the ground outside of his home.
Suicide is the story that Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) is going with but there are questions about her account of what occurred. Sandra has lied about key details of what led to her husband's death. She lies about how close they were, she lies about having had a screaming argument with him. Caught in the midst of all of this is the boy, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) whose memory of that day will be the key to unlocking what happened that day. Did Sandra murder her husband after a particularly nasty argument? Did dad take his own life by throwing himself out of a third story window? That's the mystery that drives Anatomy of a Fall.
Directed by Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall is a gripping courtroom thriller. Featuring an icy and fierce leading performance by Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall separates itself from the legal drama genre by taking what is familiar and doing it better. It helps a great deal that we are in a French courtroom and not an American one. The French, according to this movie, my only reference point, follow a much more loose structure. Lawyers for the prosecution and defense are allowed to linger over theories and converse with people who are not currently on the witness stand. It's strange to watch if you've never seen a court room thriller in France and that raises the bar for this relatively creaky genre.
I was captivated when the prosecuting attorney turned from the person who was testifying and began addressing Huller's Sandra directly to get her reaction in real time to what the witness had alleged. In an American courtroom this would be out of line and would like get a contempt citation. In France, this is normalized behavior and Sandra is forced to address the evidence presented as it is presented. The prosecutor can turn heel and speak to Sandra as if she were on the witness stand at all times. This does give Sandra a chance to respond to all of the evidence presented but it's also intentionally jarring as Sandra is given no chance to be ready when the spotlight falls on her.
The court structure of Anatomy of a Fall is enough to create a gripping legal story but it takes a truly great lead performance to bring it all together and that is certainly what we get from Sandra Huller as author Sandra Voyter. Though she maintains her innocence throughout the movie, you can sense that she's holding things back, hiding things away, and that leads you to, at the very least, wonder whether or not she could have killed her husband. The film smartly lays out the case of how the murder could have happened while deftly avoided a deliberate recreation that might tip the hand of the movie.
Triet doesn't want us to see Sandra as the killer, even in a dream scenario. Rather, she allows the court case to frame our feelings about Sandra and allows the room for Huller to reveal the character, her flaws, and the reasons that might make her appear guilty. The court scenes in Anatomy of a Fall are so well done that you need little more than hearing about what is happening, placing you in direct connection with Daniel, the only fully innocent character in the movie. Torn between believing his mother and hearing horrible things about his mother and how she has slept around during her marriage to his father, Daniel struggles with the adult task of deciding what is true and not true about his mother.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
